Simultaneous Cost and QoS Optimization for Cloud Resource Allocation

Cloud computing is a new era of computing that offers resources and services for Web applications. Selection of optimal cloud resources is the main goal in cloud resource allocation. Sometimes, customers pay more than required since cloud providers' pricing strategy is designed for the interest of the providers. Nonetheless, cloud customers are interested in selecting cloud resources to meet their quality of service (QoS) requirements. Thus, for the interest of both providers and customers, it is vital to balance the two conflicting objectives of deployment cost and QoS performance. In this paper, we present a cost-effective and runtime friendly algorithm that minimizes the deployment cost while meeting the QoS performance requirements. In other words, the algorithm offers an optimal choice, from customers' point of view, for deploying a Web application in cloud environment. The multi-objective optimization algorithm minimizes cost and maximizes QoS performance simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is verified by a series of experiments on different workload scenarios deployed in two distinct cloud providers. The results show that the proposed algorithm finds the optimal combination of cloud resources that provides a balanced trade-off between deployment cost and QoS performance in relatively low runtime.